Expectations? The Africans have little in the way of expectations. They left those behind when they fled Eritrea, Congo or the Sudan, and the emotional baggage never caught up to them in the refugee camps of Ethiopia or Rwanda.

They waited in those camps for years. “There was a lot of suicide because things are so hard,” says Birhane Hailu, 33. “You can’t work. No jobs. No school.” And when the spark from a cigarette or a lightning strike sends fire raging through the shacks? “No water.”

When they are finally pulled from the wasteland by the International Rescue Committee, when they are ticketed for resettlement in America, you can understand the dizzying temptation to dream big.

“Most of us think we’re going to see a miracle,” Thierry Gasasu admits. “Paradise.

Given their memories and humility, it never occurs to these African refugees to complain.

But, hey, they’re far better people than I am.

* * *

On the wall of the cramped bedroom that Hailu shares with Tesfom Wolday, eight miles from the dairy and 8,000 miles from Eritrea, a small scroll frames these words from Psalm 119:

“The word of the Lord is more precious to me than thousands in gold and silver.”

A good thing, that. Because the word of the Lord has a far better chance of sustaining them than the workload and take-home pay at the Threemile Canyon dairy.

Wolday and Hailu are two of the stalwarts among the 30-some refugees who work at the dairy and bunk at the Maple Crest Apartments in Boardman. As Wolday prepared dinner in early October — beef, onions and peppers on Injera bread — Hailu framed the daily routine:

“We only have time,” he said, “to go to work and sleep.”

An Ethiopian video is playing on the TV in the living room. At least two dozen flies float through the small kitchen or cling to the ceiling tiles. The four refugees who share the apartment will be in bed by 9 p.m. and up again at 4 a.m., girding for another 12-hour run with the cows.

“I’m lucky, you know,” Hailu says. “I count my blessings. There are many people we left over there.”

More than 10.5 million refugees worldwide, according to the International Rescue Committee, which has resettlement operations in Seattle, Boise and 20 other American cities.

In 2011, the IRC found new homes for 224 transplants in Boise. Many of the household heads took jobs as dishwashers, barbers, janitors and motel housekeepers.

The strongest and the most desperate volunteered for Boardman and the dairy.

“It is physically demanding and long hours,” said Julianne Donnelly Tzul, the executive director of the IRC’s Boise office. “The amount of interest people have in going to Boardman fluctuates directly with how well (job placement is) going in Boise.”

Threemile Canyon Farms is owned by the R.D. Offutt Company, based in Fargo, N.D. Parked on 93,000 acres in the Columbia River basin, the farm produces 200,000 tons of potatoes annually. Its dairy operation features 16,000 milking cows, or one-seventh of the cows in Oregon.

Threemile Canyon would not allow The Oregonian on the property; three phone calls to the farm management, Marty Myers and Greg Harris, were not returned. When Walt Guterbock, the farm’s livestock manager, spoke to the Los Angeles Times in 2010, however, he put the dairy work in perspective.

Hailu and Wolday move through pens containing up to 900 cows, separating out the animals that are too sick to produce good milk.

And Hailu and Wolday have it relatively easy, compared, at least to Thierry Gasasu, an Eritrean who has been milking the suckers for the last eight months.

Or Katanga Janvier, who works “maternity.” In each 12-hour shift, he gets two breaks, totaling 50 minutes. The other 670 minutes, he’s in pregnant cows up to his elbows, delivering calves.

He’s paid $10 an hour, Janvier says, and not a dime of overtime, even though he’s on the clock an average of 63 hours each week.

Sixty-three. Six days (of 12-hour shifts) on, two days off.

“I make $1,600 a month,” says Janvier, who fled Congo’s civil war in 2003. He sends $500 each month to support his mother and younger brother in Boise, then shells out $150 for rent and $430 for the payment on his 2006 Monte Carlo.

That leaves him with $520 each month — or $17 a day — on which to eat, pay bills (gas, insurance) and dream.

All expectation aside, these Africans understand the generosity that has brought them this far.

The United States takes in more than 50 percent of the international refugees who are resettled each year in new countries.

The city of Boise, Donnelly Tzul says, provides passionate support for the refugee community, with local government, non-profits and area churches and synagogues all stepping up.

And give Threemile Canyon Farms — which prefers to hire African refugees owing to its increased nervousness about undocumented workers — its due.

Under its current contract with the United Farm Workers, the farm provides dairy workers with benefits that are hard to come by in Boise.

What’s more, once Hailu, Gasasu, Janvier and friends realize they will never save enough — to escape the dairy, at least — working a piddling 40 hours a week, Threemile Canyon generously allows them to work 63.

Without overtime, of course. By federal law, agriculture workers are exempt from overtime pay provisions.

Everyone agrees that’s necessary for the poor, beleaguered, 93,000-acre family farms to survive.

“It’s not ideal,” Donnelly Tzul concedes. “This is an area where there are a lot of tough choices, and choices difficult to live through.

“But our clients are smart advocates for themselves. They’re also thinking human beings who can decide when they’ve had enough, and decide to leave.”

True. But they are also humble, generous strangers in a strange corner of Morrow County, at least five hours from the nearest family member and nine time zones from their familiar.

When asked how he and his buddies meet women, Hailu said they don’t: “In my language, I know the rules. What to say. We don’t know the rules over here. And I don’t want to make trouble.”

So it is, on the first Tuesday in October, that they make beef, onions and peppers on Injera bread instead. They are tired and lonely and years from their dreams, and they want to remember just how good life can taste.